The Feeling are proud of their crafty tunes and are sure that when people get past the soft-rock tag, they'll discover a rock'n'roll heart beating very loudly indeed, lead singer Dan Gillespie Sells tells Kevin Courtney
EVER get the feeling you're being taken for a rock'n'roll ride? Ever suspect that there's a conspiracy to shove only "cool" bands down your throat while sidelining anything that might smack of musicianship, songwriting skill or radio-friendliness? Ever buy an album by Clap Your Broken Architecture from Above and wonder, where are the f***ing songs? Then you might well be ready for The Feeling, a gang of London pop minstrels who don't subscribe to the idea that rock has to be all spiky hair, spiky riffs and spiky attitude.
In a pop world where noise is normal, discord is dogma and songs are optional, The Feeling may be true rock'n'roll rebels - for them, rebellion means citing Freddie Mercury as a hero instead of Kurt Cobain, and buying an old 10cc album instead of Never Mind the Bollocks.
"Everything's so angular," complains Dan Gillespie Sells, lead singer and songwriter with London's least-angular combo. "It's like, where's all the melody gone, and all the harmonies, and all those other sweet things about music?"
Gillespie is standing outside London's Coco Club, where The Feeling are about to open for The Pretenders. This, reckons Gillespie, is far more of a privilege than opening for, say, Arctic Monkeys or any one of a million other "buzz" bands flitting around at the moment. He's just met Chrissie Hynde, who he gushingly describes as "a legend, an amazing songwriter and a complete genius." One suspects he wouldn't be saying the same thing about Courtney Love.
The Feeling have been quietly conquering hearts with their deceptively skilful pop tunes, which tend to start off a little soft and bedwettery, but soon blossom out into great big musical masterworks with bewitching harmonies, beguiling lyrics and bedazzling choruses. It's been lumped in with soft rock, but songs such as Sewn and Fill My Little World positively shine beside the lumpen offerings being droned out elsewhere.
The alt.rock fascists don't want you to like The Feeling, but you'll find yourself humming their songs anyway, furtively looking over your shoulder to make sure the grunge gestapo or the Franz-er division don't catch you indulging in this most pleasurable of guilty pleasures.
"Two years ago, when we were looking for a record deal for these songs, the safe option would have been to wear skinny jeans and become like some kind of an art-rock band, and make ourselves a bit more indie," says Sells.
"That was the safe option, and we would have got a record deal much quicker. We've found with the current bands out there that we don't fit in at all with any of the scenes, we look so out of place, and I think to a certain extent we've always felt that way, and the only people we feel we have an affiliation with, and can kind of understand musically, are bands like Pink Floyd, and other bands from 30 years ago. We feel we could easily understand them, but we don't have a clue what's going on with bands from the present day."
In The Feeling's publicity material, Sell admits he would like to be Karen Carpenter in Neil Young's body wearing Freddie Mercury's trousers. It doesn't quite sum up the ethos of this London-Sussex quintet, but it does give you an idea of the pop template the band are working off. The Feeling have been together in one shape or another for years; they cut their teeth as a covers band, playing popular hits for the après-ski crowd in the Alps - not quite The Beatles in Hamburg, Dan admits, but at least it gave them the instrumental skills and the knowledge of pop dynamics to start writing their own songs.
"It was intense. We did 10 shows a week, from five till seven and then another show at 10pm. We'd have to carry all our own gear up and set it up, and squeeze into a small area. We lived on alcohol and slept in this tiny, tiny room together, with two bunks on either side, with just enough room in between for someone to sleep on the floor. But I'll tell you what - it was a massive learning experience. When you learn that many classic pop songs, and you learn the anatomy of them, learn them inside out, and you can see what kind of reaction the crowd has to them, you really learn about what makes a crowd go off.
"We did it so often that we learned every trick in the book, kind of subliminally, not even thinking about it. We had no idea what effect it was gonna have on us until we started playing our own stuff, and realised how important it was."
It helped, of course, that Sells had already been writing tunes since he was 16, and that all five agreed on how they were going to look and sound. The band - Sells on vocals and guitar, Richard Jones on bass, brothers Kevin and Ciaran Jeremiah on guitar and keyboards and Paul Stewart on drums - are now all in their late 20s and feel they've earned their stripes and are ready to take their place beside all those other pop bands they don't feel an affinity with. After releasing two well-received singles, the jaunty Fill My Little World and the intricately-embroidered Sewn (complete with Sledgehammer-style video in which the band literally get sewn up), The Feeling are set to release their full-length debut, Twelve Stops and Home.
"It was a line in a song that was kind of written about the tube," explains Dan. "I've lived 12 stops from London all my life, on the Piccadilly line, and I've kind of always had this love/hate relationship with the journey I've always taken to get home. I think any kind of journey you take home can be tinged with all kinds of emotional connotations. Sometimes it's a good journey and sometimes it's a terrible journey. And the song is kind of all about that."
Sells hopes that the album itself will be a musical journey; if not a magical mystery tour, then at least an alternative rock'n'roll ride, taking the listener through a variety of moods and modes, from simple pop ballads to complex prog-rock epics. A one-way ticket to pop heaven. and back, if you will.
"We didn't want to have one of those records that kind of plods along at the same pace, which I think a lot of modern records tend to do. It seems a shame because in the 60s and 70s, the albums that I have, they just seem to go all over the place. Queen is a good example, because in their albums they'd have this kind of ludicrous rock ballad, and then all of a sudden they're playing this real pop song, and the next minute they're playing something which sounds like a madrigal from the 16th century, and I kind of love Queen albums for that - they're so pompous and weird. And we thought we'd try to get that element into our record as well."
If all goes well for The Feeling, they may soon find themselves on more than nodding terms with the so-called cool bands of the day. And who knows, they might even shift a few people's perception of what may be deemed cool. The Feeling may be not-so-loud, but they're proud of their crafty tunes and feel sure that when people get past the soft-rock tag, they'll discover a rock'n'roll heart beating very loudly indeed.
"I think the truth will always come out in the end. When we were doing our first press release, it was all about us being soft-rock and easy listening and pushing that side of what we are about. And that was because that was the only thing that was going to set us apart from anybody else. But I think when the record comes out, and people start listening to it, the truth about what we do will come out anyway.
"So I don't think we need to push the side of us that's deeper or the side that's more interesting, I think that'll come through in the music."
Twelve Stops and Home is out on June 2nd on Island Records
